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Pen and paper are still superior, but iPad sketching is good enough to leave those behind.

The topic of UI sketching on the iPad is coming up pretty regularly for UI designers. People want to know how it feels and if it's going to replace pen/pencil and paper. After a few months using as many drawing apps as I can get my hands on, I find that it's more than adequate for UI sketching needs. Pen and paper are still superior, but iPad sketching is good enough to leave those behind when you're away from your desk. Here's my run down of pros/cons.

My initial reaction was that finger/nail drawing wasn't going to cut it. For one thing, while you can get around the fat finger obstacles by using your fingernail as your tip, fingers don't work because they hide the screen. A stylus helps, but because of the fat tips of capacitive styli and the friction caused by capacitive foam, it doesn't feel as smooth and the foam stylus doesn't glide on the glass. But, I don't think that's a hindrance for basic sketching. I've also read that the sensors on the touch screen aren't really designed to work with fine tips in the same way that resistive (pressure sensitive) screens are. What I think would be perfect is something that glides like your fingernail on the end of a stick--a plastic nib in the center of a capacitive foam tip.

With all my nits and dream stylus fantasies, at the end of the day I think that the fatness of a pen like the Pogo Sketch is arguably better in terms of forcing you to do rough sketching as opposed to fine detailed drawings. Roughness and low-fidelity is one of the important attributes of ideation--generating ideas in quick succession and in volume to explore ideas without fussing over aesthetics. This is how I'm justifying the constraints in my head anyway. :)

That in mind, some designers, regardless of my rationalization, will care about the feel of pen options and responsiveness of drawing programs. There's an interesting blog entry on the doodl.es blog that talks about capacitive styli and the applications Brushes and Sketchbook Pro from an artist's perspective. While some of the discussion about the features of the apps may not be relevant to everyone, the description of what is possible to those who care about the style of their drawings will like the comparison of the Pogo Sketch with the HTC HD2 stylus.

I finally settled on using Sketchbook Pro with a Pogo Sketch the most for its closeness in feel to sketching on paper. It's about as good as it gets for my needs right now. I won't argue with anyone that says it's not as natural-feeling as paper, but it's good enough for me. For detailed work, I think the capabilities of the vector drawing tools in OmniGraffle for iPad are also very interesting, because your lines have all the line properties that OG offers, and can be closed to make shapes, with fill properties. Some of the features in OG iPad are so good actually, that I can see them being useful in OG Pro Desktop.

I'm going to try to occasionally post sketches in this iPad Sketch Flickr group, so watch that space.

The model for sustaining customer loyalty is reverse engineering user awesomeness.

Peldi pointed me to a video of Kathy Sierra's presentation at Business of Software 09, where she talks about sustaining passionate and loyal customers. Positioning and generating sustainable relationships is not what you think it should be about. It's about user benefits, and not features--about how they feel about themselves in the context of what you provide them.

Don't make a better [X], make a better [user of X].

What creates the conditions for a user to be happy is how they experience what they do in the world because of what you give them. To jump to the chase, it's not about good products, good service, or good companies. It's not about you at all. It's about your users.

The model for sustaining customer loyalty is reverse engineering user awesomeness. Doing things that continue to let them say, "I'm awesome" because of things your product lets them do. Helping people kick ass FTW.

Don't sell me, teach me and I'll do the rest.

One example she gives has to do with how you treat examples vs. documentation. She references a Nikon learning site that shows people how to capture a waterfall, and cuts right to that user voice that says, "I want to do that."

By providing a learning experience that tells this story rather than expecting users to read the manual, the user can do more and go further than any technical document will ever enable them to do. Manuals let users understand tools, but stories and examples help users have great experiences. If you help users have that experience, they associate you with that experience--that awesomeness they create themselves. It's not about creating better products necessarily, it's about enabling people to become better users.

She suggests focussing on compelling questions, like the ones below, that have to do with creating that user experience.

• Focus on what the user does, not what you do.
• Ask, "What does having a solution mean to our users? What [bigger cooler thing] is enabled?"
• Give them super powers.
• Offer better gear and help them justify it to others. Give them higher "resolution".
• Motivate and Inspire. Give them motivation for things they WANT to do but aren't. Get stuck camera users out of P mode.
• Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult.
• Make them actually smarter. Keep users working on the smart things. Offer exercises, games, etc. that support deliberate practice of the right things. Make the time more fun. Turn the brain on with cognitive pleasures.
• Shrink the user's 10,000 hours (time spent working on a specific task), by giving them patterns or shortening the duration of that time.
• Make your product or your documentation reflect how they really feel.
• What does being your user SAY about your user? What would their tshirt read?
• On the heroes journey, we have to think about who we are to our users, and what role we actually play.
• Don't insist on inclusivity. It's OK to split off the advanced ass kickers from the newbies in your community.

I have to agree with the closing point she makes. What we're doing by making software is increasing the resolution of the universe for people--increasing their ability to see more and feel expert in their world.

If you haven't already watched the hour long video above, I highly recommend making the time to come back to it.

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/05/kathy-sierra-at-business-of-software-2009.html

I was chatting with UX friends Matt and Mark when the topic of taste came up. Mark brought up the Ira Glass Storytelling series of videos, which are great. If you haven't seen it, there's a great discussion on taste for creators.

This is Ira Glass from This American Life talking about story telling, and how we get into creative work because we love it and we have good taste. He talks about the gap in the beginning when we're trying to make stuff, that turns out short of our expectations. With taste, we know when our execution falls short. I think I've been doing what I do long enough to know about that feeling of disappointment.

Glass offers this advice for sticking it out.

It's going to take you a while. It's normal to take a while and you just have to fight your way through that. OK? You will be fierce, you will be a warrior, and you will make things that aren't as good as you know in your heart you want them to be. And you will just make one after another.

When we make things that don't reflect our taste level, it can be frustrating, but it keeps us doing the work. Because, in the end, what we say about taste is never as good as showing our taste level by executing.

I think I have pretty good taste, although it doesn't reflect a singular style or aesthetic, and ranges from the minimalism and zen on one end (good taste) to embracing the ugly and conceptual on the other (decidely bad taste that's so bad it's good). I think my execution gets better with every project, which is why I do a lot of small projects. I know I'm not a visual designer, so I'm the harshest judge and critic of my attempts. The repeated execution really helps get me closer, in my opinion, to understanding how to deliver tasteful projects and products.

I'm going to sound like a broken record, but to piggyback on Glass' message, I think it's productive to do small and insignificant work for the sake of doing it. This is why I do repeated redesigns/reskinning of personal projects. I believe your blog doesn't count in the don't redesign/realign argument unless doing so affects your livelihood. If you ever followed my personal blog, you know that's how I learned to do better CSS. Even if you're only sketching ideas that will never see the light of day, or making collages of unicorns and rainbows, it counts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2wLP0izeJE